Thursday, March 8, 2018

My inauspicious introduction to Airbnb

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson
Mail, February 21.)

I used Airbnb for the first time during the summer
holidays. It wasn’t an experience I’m in any hurry to repeat.

I had booked the house several months in advance. Our
son and his family were coming from overseas and we were looking forward to spending
some time with them.

The property wasn’t ideal, but accommodation in the
area we wanted was already getting tight and I was worried that if we waited
for something better to come up, we might miss out altogether.

The house boasted five-star reviews, but no photos of
the interior – in hindsight, a warning sign. Instead, the listing emphasised
the lovely view (true enough) and the appealing location.

Alarm bells started ringing when the owner told me,
after I had booked, that Airbnb had made a mistake with the listing by
understating the rental fee.

Call me naive, but I agreed to pay the extra amount
she requested. The advertised fee did seem modest compared with other houses we’d
seen listed, but it occurred to me that she might have deliberately pitched it
low to attract business in the hope she could then talk the renter into paying
more.

My suspicions about the owner’s modus operandi were
heightened when the time came to pay the extra money and she asked me to
transfer the amount to her bank account, rather than pay through the Airbnb
site. By doing this, she presumably avoided paying a share of the fee to
Airbnb.

She also asked me to label the payment in such a way
that it wouldn’t look like income. Why do that unless it was to avoid paying
tax?

I should have questioned this dodgy-looking
arrangement, but by this time we were in the house and I didn’t want to spoil
our holiday, which was brief anyway, by getting into a potentially unpleasant
dispute with the owner. In any case, I was philosophical about the sum of money
involved. It bought us precious whanau time.

Later, when the owner came up with a far-fetched
justification for claiming still more dosh, I politely but firmly declined.

Now, the property. The owner lived there herself and
had vacated it for our stay.

We arrived in the early evening – too late to make
alternative arrangements when we saw the state the house was in. It was a
matter of making the best of a bad job.

The fridge was filthy and half-full of the owner’s own
food, much of it looking well past its use-by date. The oven, one element of
which had burned out, was in a similarly disgusting state. The first hour of
our stay was spent getting the two appliances clean.

The dishwasher, which still had some of the owner’s
soiled dishes in it, was even more vile. Its interior was coated with a layer
of scum. We bought some dishwasher cleaning fluid the next day and ran a
two-hour cleaning cycle.

The cutlery drawer, too, was thick with grime. We
removed as much cutlery as we needed, thoroughly cleaned it and kept it
separate for the duration of our stay.

There were bins full of rubbish, the bed linen was
tired, and when my wife mopped the bathroom floor it turned out to not be the
colour we thought it was.

Half the light bulbs in the house didn’t function and
the two gas bottles for the barbecue were empty. (After I had confirmed with
the owner that there was a barbecue available, my wife asked me whether I’d established
that full gas bottles were supplied. “Of course they will be,” said I. “If
there’s a barbecue, there’ll be gas bottles.” Ha! More fool me.)

We couldn’t believe anyone could live in such
conditions, let alone have the nerve to charge others for the pleasure, but
perhaps it just doesn’t occur to some people that their houses are a mess.

I should also mention that there were the owner’s two
cats to be fed and a couple of sheep in a neighbouring paddock that needed to
be kept supplied with water. We were basically house-sitters, paying to look
after the place while the owner enjoyed a holiday. The grandkids did, however,
love the sheep – a rare sight where they come from.

The crowning indignity – which now seems almost
comical in retrospect – came early one morning when, padding down the darkened
hallway in bare feet, I stepped in something slimy and repulsive. Close
investigation revealed the disembowelled remains of a small furry animal,
obviously brought in by one of the cats, and next to it a pile of cat
excrement, which is what I trod in. You've gotta laugh, as they say.

I know from talking to friends who have used Airbnb
that our experience was atypical, but I’ll need some persuasion before I risk
it again. I pulled no punches in the review I wrote for the Airbnb site and
wasn’t surprised to note later that the property was no longer listed.

The remarkable thing is that we managed to have a good
time. Some readers will no doubt think we were mugs for putting up with the
conditions, but we’re a resilient lot, and our time together was too short to
ruin it by being miserable or waging war with the owner.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.